The Fans Own the Magic

HARRY POTTER’S final battle with Lord Voldemort will hit movie screens on July 15, but that young wizard has already scored a decisive victory where it counts: at the box office, on best-seller lists and in the crowded arena of fantasy-driven popular culture. J. K. Rowling, a single mother when she hatched a series of magical boarding-school novels, has ascended to an Oprah-like level of wealth and influence, while Harry, with more than $6 billion in tickets sold globally, has surpassed James Bond as the top-grossing movie-franchise hero. 

Like the books the Harry Potter movies have grown progressively darker and more complex, as the initially stark moral universe of good and evil became increasingly shaded by prickly, often confusing questions of sex and death (including the death in 2002 of Richard Harris, the first Dumbledore, who was replaced by Michael Gambon). The books and movies have fed the imaginations of fans with a richly conceptualized, densely populated world of plucky school kids, giants, dragons, trolls and adult wizards, benign and malevolent, played by the cream of British acting. Meanwhile Harry, Hermione and Ron, as incarnated by Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, have grown up before our eyes.

 “I was on the train when I suddenly had this basic idea of a boy who didn’t know who he was,” Ms. Rowling once said, explaining the genesis of her creation as lightning hit her and then Harry. In the years since, the books and movies along with all the toys, games and even a Harry Potter theme park have helped show us that in today’s multiple-platform media landscape, a movie is no longer necessarily an evening’s entertainment but, in the case of those who came of age with Harry, that of a lifetime.

Here we look at what has become a hugely profitable corporate brand, a fan-fueled sensation and one of the biggest entertainment stories of the last decade.  

DARGIS In anticipating the first Harry Potter film Anne Collins Smith, then an assistant professor at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, peered into her crystal ball and gave dark warning. “It will take a strong individual indeed to say, ‘No, that’s not what it looked like inside my head,’ and set the movie version aside,” Dr. Smith said. Worse yet, “Those who see the movie before reading the books will never have the chance to make their own vision” to the point that “for many people it will replace their own imaginations.”

Many millions of movie tickets, innumerable fan sites, wizard rock bands and conferences later, it’s indisputable that for many if not most Harry Potter lovers the movies didn’t replace their imaginations but instead enlivened and even fired them up. On deviantart.com, for instance, you can download work from a database of thousands upon thousands of fan-generated images of Harry, his friends and enemies from the photorealistic to the broadly caricatured, including anime-style creations with saucer eyes and heart-shaped faces, and what the Japanese call kawaii or cute, for a kind of Hello Kitty Harry confection. Elsewhere there are dirty-girl Hermiones aplenty and surprisingly, er, friendly Harry and Draco liaisons.

SCOTT After the runaway trans-Atlantic success of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” in the late 1990s the appearance of each new Harry Potter novel was like the opening of a blockbuster movie, but more festive and less dutiful than such occasions tend to be. At midnight bookstores across the land would be thronged with eager readers with wands and robes, round glasses and temporary lightning-bolt tattoos, and for the next few days, on every bus and park bench, everyone — schoolchildren, grandmothers, young adults with tattoos that were not temporary — would be reading the same thing. And then, as the movie versions started to come out, the scene would be repeated in the multiplexes.

This is not the first time a popular series of books has been turned into a successful series of movies, but the overlap between the literary and cinematic versions of the Potter cycle was unusual, and has proven influential. Not every effort to repeat the formula has worked — the “Lemony Snicket” and “Golden Compass” franchises never took wing on screen — but the triumph of the Potter model is reflected in the “Twilight” movies and also in the Swedish and soon-to-arrive American versions of Steig Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, which tumbled into theaters while their sources were still jumping off the bookstore shelves. In this millennium, we like to take our stories serially and in multimedia packages. 

The Harry Potter movies built on the fervid public enthusiasm for the books and fed back into it, to the extent that it is not quite accurate to call the movies adaptations, or to pursue the usual arguments about what is lost and gained when stories make the transition from words on a page to images on a screen. Remarkably large numbers of people were eager to experience the same stories twice (or more), and if some may have had a preference for Potter in prose over Potter in pictures or vice versa, it seems safe to conclude that the majority was happy to have both. 

DARGIS Before the Harry Potter movies started breaking the first of many records, it was perhaps easier to believe that mass culture is something consumers largely experienced top down, like the big infantilized blobs in “Wall-E,” unthinkingly gulping whatever they’re fed. Harry Potter fans have made it a lot tougher to sell that old-fashioned idea. They have found an astonishment of ways to express their love (and sometimes profit on that adoration) and also at times challenged the supremacy of Warner Brothers, the studio that owns the rights to the movies. From the start the studio had been fierce about protecting its property (in the case of Harry Potter condoms, you can’t blame it), but in the process it also stumbled.

One of its roadblocks was Heather Lawver, a Potterhead who at 14 created The Daily Prophet, a fake (now inactive) online school newspaper about all things Potter. A few years later Ms. Lawver herself became news when, in response to Warner Brothers’ ham-fisted and -headed bids to shut down fan Web sites, some run by children as young as 11 and 12, she helped start a boycott of Potter merchandise (known as PotterWar), a press-relations stroke of genius (she debated a studio spokesman on “Hardball”) that threatened to derail the company’s strategy of global domination.

“It really got me mad,” Ms. Lawver said in 2001, months before the release of the first movie, noting that another site creator “was afraid these lawyers would come banging down her door and take away all her family’s money.”

 Faced with being cast as a bully on the eve of its latest potential gold mine Warner Brothers backed down as representatives insisted no harm was intended. (“We are not a big, scary corporation,” one executive said.) Prof. Henry Jenkins of the University of California, an enthusiastic champion of fan power, has framed the fight in near-revolutionary terms, writing on his Web site that PotterWar “may have been the first successful movement of fans to challenge the rather blanket copyright assertions of the major media producers.” Certainly it was a striking moment for plugged-in Potterites, yet it’s debatable whether the type of fan triumph that Professor Jenkins and others celebrate is as radical as sometimes suggested. Warner Brothers, after all, still owns the film rights.

SCOTT If you asked a roomful of movie critics to name the best Harry Potter movie, the consensus choice would be “Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, whose other critically beloved films include the sexy Mexican road movie “Y Tu Mamá También” and the dystopian thriller “Children of Men.” “Azkaban” was stamped with Mr. Cuarón’s style; it was not only thematically more unsettling than the first two movies (both directed by Chris Columbus), but also visually stranger and more artful.

Perhaps for that reason it is generally the least liked movie among hard-core Potterites, which is to say those viewers whose devotion to the characters and the story trumps their interest in the art of cinema for its own sake. Critics have tended to assess each film on its own merits as an individual work, which is perfectly reasonable — it’s our job, after all — but also a bit beside the point, just as the demurrals of literary critics who find fault with Ms. Rowling’s prose style or sense of narrative economy are both right and fundamentally out of touch.

From the start the appeal of the Potter cycle has been its generous dispensation of narrative pleasure. You might find a particular installment or character or series of incidents especially exciting or vaguely disappointing, but you would not be fully satisfied until the whole thing was complete, until you had plumbed the mystery of Harry Potter’s origins and witnessed the resolution of his fate. 

DARGIS More than a decade after the end of PotterWar, the ideology if perhaps not the utopian spirit of media consumers asserting their voices has become business as usual for media companies, which insist it’s all about you you you and not them them them. It’s inspiring when fans like Ms. Lawver assert that they too have a claim on favorite books and movies, even those owned by corporations, just as there’s something hilarious and maybe cathartic about rather grown-up interventions like “Strawberry Yields,” a bit of “fanfic” by one “Dementor Delta” featuring Harry, Professor Snape and some fruit. (“Potter had a fondness for bananas that was almost obscene.”) But just because a media giant is having a party doesn’t mean you’re actually invited.  

The idea that media consumers may one day be able to siphon media power for our own purposes, as Professor Jenkins has suggested (if we can get around those pesky copyright laws), remains open to debate. As is the idea that cultural production is now a free-flowing two-way street because today’s fans, armed with laptops and social media, can appropriate mass culture in a more immersive fashion (i.e., online). The truth is that culture has never strictly been a one-way street, even in the pre-Internet dark ages. For instance, back in Hollywood’s golden age stars could be deemed box office poison by the front office because audiences voted each time they bought a ticket. It may be that instead of real choices, consumers now have just a lot of choices: thousands of television channels instead of a handful, and an entire Harry Potter media universe instead of a few rippingly good books and movies.

SCOTT The staggered appearance of novels and films seems, in retrospect, to have been calculated, with almost diabolical brilliance, to maximize the audience. The first cadre of 9-year-olds who read “Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Chamber of Secrets” were primed to line up for the film adaptations of those books, as the movies prepared new readers for the fourth book, “Goblet of Fire,” and so on. Young people — those born after 1990 — were the vanguard and the core audience, and even if Harry had not also appealed to their parents, grandparents and older siblings, the Potter fan base represents a fairly significant sample of the world’s population.

And what has Harry given them? The movies have provided a showcase for the art of acting. Some great professionals — Alan Rickman, Imelda Staunton, Maggie Smith, David Thewlis and so on and so on — have demonstrated both high seriousness and a fine sense of play, and Ralph Fiennes has proven that it can be done without a nose. And we have watched potential movie stars of the future blossom before our eyes. More generally, and perhaps more profoundly, we have immersed ourselves in a world of grave danger and relentless evil that is make-believe enough not to bleed into our own messy Muggle reality. The adults in the audience have slid back into the breathless, compulsive readerly absorption (and cinematic enthrallment) of childhood, while our children have, with equal breathlessness, leaned forward into the complexity and exhilaration of growing up. We can all feel, under the spell of these stories, as if we were in full possession of our powers.